Читать книгу The Perils of Pauline - Charles Goddard - Страница 6

Old Mr. Marvin's faculties returned with a snap. There was the library just as it had been before his peculiar seizure. His son Harry was summoning on the telephone Dr. Stevens, the heart specialist, and Pauline, his adopted daughter, was on her knees chafing his hands and anxiously watching his face, while Owen, the secretary, was pouring out a dose of his medicine. But the peculiar yellow light had gone. And what about the mummy? It stood just as he had left it, the lower half of the case was in place, the upper half was out, revealing the loosened bandages and just a glimpse of the forehead.

One strand of jet black hair hung down. All was just as it was when the little vial had fallen out.

"I'm all right, I'm all right," protested Mr. Marvin, somewhat testily, as he twisted about in his chair to get a good view of the mummy. "Look out, Harry, don't step on that little bottle."

Harry looked down and picked up the tiny vial which had fallen from the bandages wrapped about the ancient form.

"Smell of it," his father ordered. Harry sniffed it and remarked that it smelled musty and passed it to Pauline. The girl carried it to her nostrils spin and again. She looked perplexed.

"Well, what do you think it is?" asked the old man.

"Why—I can't remember, but I ought to know. I'm sure I do know."

"The devil you do," muttered her faster father.

"What makes you think you ought to know?"

"Why, it is so familiar. I'm certain I've smelled it often before.

Haven't I?"

"Well, if you have, Polly, you are a lot older than I am, older than anything in this country, as old as the pyramids. That bottle fell out of the mummy, and I can assure you it has been there some three or four thousand years. When I smelled of that bottle it had a queer effect on me. I felt as if I were going to have one of my fainting spells and was glad to get back to the chair. It's funny about that mummy. I thought she came out and talked to me."

"Why, father, what a horrible thing!" sympathized Pauline.

"Not horrible at all. She was a beauty and a princess. She was interested in your picture, Polly, and she looked like you, too, except, let's see—yes, her hair was black, jet black, like that one lock you see hanging down."

"Oh," interrupted Pauline, "I wish my hair were black, and I often dream that it is, and that I am walking around in a pretty, white pleated dress and my feet are bare."

"And a bracelet on your wrist—your right wrist?" questioned Marvin eagerly.

"I don't remember," Pauline replied thoughtfully.

"Well, we'll see if you had one and also whether I was dreaming or not," announced the old man with a half ashamed look as he rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. Harry and Pauline tried to keep him quiet. He brushed their warnings aside and walked unsteadily to the mummy.

"Let's see its face," suggested Harry carelessly.

"No," said his father. "I have an idea that this old but young lady would not care to have us look at her. But there is one thing I must find out. I want to know if she wears a bracelet of linked scarabs on her right wrist or not."

All of this was rather a bore to Harry, who lived intensely in the present, had no interest in Egypt, except that Pauline was born and adopted as an orphan baby there, and asked nothing of the future except that it allow him to marry this obstinate but fascinating little creature at the earliest possible moment. The question had been brought up half an hour before, and he wanted it settled at once. Harry wished they would decide about the marriage instead of fussing around with an old mummy.

"My son, I venture to say that you would have been interested in this young woman had you met her."

"Possibly," the youth admitted with a slight yawn.

"Yes," continued his father, busily searching for the mummy's right wrist, "she was probably what you would call a peach."

"She may have been a peach in her day," thought Harry, "but today she's a dried apricot."

The elder Marvin's searching fingers encountered a hard object. It proved to be a scarab, or sacred Egyptian beetle, carved in black stone.

"Did you ever dream about that?" asked Harry, chaffing.

"Yes, I have," replied Pauline. Both men looked at her to see if she were serious.

"I dreamed that I was very sick and going to die, and an old man with a long, thin beard came in. He gave me a stone beetle like that. Then it seems to me they put it right on my chest and they said—let's see, what did they do that for? I think it was to cure me of something the matter with my heart."

"Polly," said Mr. Marvin, "I never knew you had dreams like this. But are you sure they said it would cure your heart? Wasn't it for some other reason?"

Pauline thought a moment, while Harry lit a cigarette and his father worked his fingers down toward the mummy's right wrist.

"No," said Pauline, "I remember now. It wasn't to cure it at all. It was to make it keep quiet."

"Ho, ho!" laughed Harry. "I never knew of any one making it flutter much. I guess that was no dream."

Harry's father silenced him with an impatient gesture and turned to Pauline, who was watching the wind make cat's paws on the polished surface of the Hudson River.

"Go on, girl, go on. This is remarkable. I have read of this custom in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead'! Why did they want to keep your heart quiet?"

"They said," continued Pauline, dreamily, "that after I died my spirit was to be called before somebody—a God, I guess—who would judge whether I was good enough for Heaven or not. That stone beetle was placed on my heart to make it keep silent and not tell anything wicked I might have done in life. Aren't dreams crazy things? Say, Harry, there goes a hydroplane."

The two young people hung out the open window. The old man was absorbed, too. He had at last worked his fingers along the entire length of the mummy's right wrist. It was dry and hard as any mummy he had ever seen, but it bore neither bracelet nor any ornament whatever.

"Well," he said, reluctantly, "it was all a dream, interesting but not important. Like Polly's dream, it was just the echo of something I have read or seen."

"Oh, pshaw! What are dreams, anyway?" muttered Harry, with impatience.

"Dreams," said Pauline, authoritatively, "dreams are the bubbles which rise to the surface of the mind when it cools down in sleep."

"Now," observed Harry, quietly, "when you and father are through talking about mummies and dreams I wish you would consider something that I am interested in. I'd like to know how soon you are going to marry me?"

"Where did you get that definition of dreams, Polly?" asked the old man.

"From my story," said Pauline, proudly.

Both men at once remembered that she had gone to find the magazine and show them her first story. They eagerly demanded to see it.

Pauline picked up the Cosmopolitan from the floor. She had dropped it in her agitation at finding her foster father had fainted. Sure enough, there it was: